Page:Karl Liebknecht - Militarism (1917).djvu/154

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MILITARISM

THE ARMY AND STRIKE-BREAKING.

By sending soldiers under military command to act as strike-breakers militarism interferes directly with the struggle of labor to emancipate itself. We need only point to the case of the present commander of the Imperial Anti-socialist Union, Lieutenant-General v. Liebert, who even as a simple colonel had comprehended in 1896 that strikes are a calamity, like a conflagration or inundation, of course, a calamity for the employers whose protecting spirit and executive officer he felt himself to be.

As regards Germany, a special notoriety attaches to the method of gently pushing the men released from military service into the ranks of the strike-breakers, a method practised as late as the summer of 1906 during the Nuremberg strike.

Of much greater importance are three events that occurred outside of Germany. In the first place we must mention the military strike-breaking on a large scale that took place during the Dutch general railroad strike in January, 1903,